‘For-profit care may impact on nation’s health’

A LEADING hospital consultant has said the Government is wasting money on a ‘for-profit’ healthcare system while the public health sector is languishing because of inadequate funding.

Dr Orla Hardiman, a consultant neurologist at Beaumont Hospital, in Dublin, said the Government was throwing tax incentives into profit-making health schemes in a swing towards for-profit healthcare that could negatively impact on the population’s general health.

She said for-profit healthcare would not fix the problems that exist in the public health sector and that the move to for-profit meant the public sector’s urgent need for targeted funding to address the lack of clinical staff and essential equipment was being neglected.

Dr Hardiman said the health service is playing catch-up on funding and is being planned reactively rather than proactively — meaning that health authorities find it hard to effect genuine improvements.

She said that while private hospitals may provide more rapid access to certain types of health care — usually those requiring procedures or operations — they do not provide the emergency care which makes up the overwhelming majority of cases in public hospitals.

“Most patients admitted as in-patients to public hospitals are not suitable for care in a private hospital, including most patients admitted via A&E. That is why there are patients with top level health insurance on trolleys in public A&E departments while there are beds empty in nearby private facilities.

“Putting in ‘for-profit’ healthcare is not going to fix the crisis in A&E, nor is it going to fix or improve the general health status of the population,” said Dr Hardiman.

She said the evidence suggests that when you put in for-profit healthcare as one of the primary modes for delivering healthcare, you “actually increase the cost of healthcare and decrease and disimprove the overall determinants of health, such as life-expectancy ... and infant mortality”.

The Department of Health said there is no private agenda in health and that public health accounts for nearly 80% of all health spending.

Dr Hardiman will address SIPTU’s National Women’s Forum in Killarney this afternoon.